Police arrested two men in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday in connection with the shooting deaths of two Black transgender women whose bodies were found in hotel rooms less than two weeks apart.
Police found the first woman, Jaida Peterson, at the Quality Inn & Suites Airport on April 4 and the second woman, Remy Fennell, at the Sleep Inn University Place on Thursday, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
The cases were so similar — both victims were Black trans women, were engaged in sex work and were fatally shot in hotel rooms — that police issued an “urgent” message to the LGBTQ community, particularly those engaged in sex work, during a news conference Thursday evening.
Rob Tufano, the department’s public affairs director, said sex workers needed to be “hypercautious, hypervigilant in who they’re engaged with” and aware of their surroundings.
On Friday, police announced they arrested two men whom they allege were both involved in the killings. Dontarius Long and Joel Brewer were each charged with two counts of murder, two counts of possession of a firearm by a felon, one count of robbery with a dangerous weapon and one count of conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon.
Following the announcement, Lt. Bryan Crum said during a Friday news conference the department doesn’t believe “there’s any further risk to public safety.”
“I can tell you that our investigation has advanced to the point that I feel confident in telling you there is no one else at large that was a part of this,” he said.
Investigators are still looking into the suspects’ alleged motives, Crum said, and they’re working with the FBI to determine whether the killings could be considered hate crimes.
“If hate crime charges are appropriate, we will absolutely pursue those,” he said.
Peterson and Fennell are among 15 transgender people killed so far in 2021, though that number could be higher because police often deadname and misgender them — use a trans person’s name and pronouns assigned at birth — in reports about their deaths. So far, nine of the known trans victims are Black trans women.
Prior to the arrests, advocates in Charlotte said Black trans women were scared.
“Many of them use hotels as their primary form of housing, and they don’t feel safe to be there right now,” Ash Williams, a trans organizer in Charlotte, said. “So, many of us are moving up to try to raise funds for safer, nonhotel housing for the Black trans women that live in Charlotte.”
But even after the arrests, Williams said trans people in Charlotte don’t feel safer, because police “criminalize” Black trans sex workers.
“We keep us safe,” he said. “The police do not keep us safe — they made that clear last week when they deadnamed and misgendered Jaida, so we don’t give a f— about what the police are talking about.”
In a statement to NBC News, Tufano said “Community members should have an expectation to live and work without the fear of violence.”
He added “Because of the tireless work of members of the CMPD, two dangerous people can no longer prey on vulnerable members of our community. The arrests will never bring back the lives of the two innocent souls lost, but may bring some measure of peace to their loved ones.”
After the shootings, Charlotte groups House of Kanautica, Charlotte Uprising, Feed the Movement CLT and End Trans Hate in North Carolina began raising funds to help safely house Black trans women and sex workers, potentially in long-term Airbnbs.
Eventually, activists would like to start a housing initiative similar to My Sistah’s House in Memphis, Tennessee, where a group is building tiny homes for Black trans women.
In the meantime, Williams said Black trans women will continue to push for the same support they’ve demanded for years: better access to hormone therapy, employment and housing.
“They’re underemployed or not employed because people don’t want to hire them,” he said.
“That’s the reality that the girls are dealing with every single day,” he added. “They deserve housing all the time — not just when a lot of girls are getting killed in our community.”
Heather Hughes, a music and math teacher at a private school in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, said a 16-year-old student pulled out her phone Monday afternoon and announced that Gov. Asa Hutchinson had vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender minors from accessing gender-affirming medical care.
Hughes said it shows that young people understand the national conversation about trans youth, who are the focus of a wave of state bills that seek to restrict their access to transition-related medical care and sports.
“They get that something’s up, and they understand enough to be like, ‘This is a bad idea,’” Hughes said of her students. “They think it’s asinine. They don’t understand why it’s a big deal in the first place, like why bother making these bills, and so then anytime it’s brought up, they’re mostly infuriated.”
Another student, who is 15, talked to Hughes last week about how they wanted to start testosterone soon. But on Tuesday, the Arkansas Legislature overrode Hutchinson’s veto, and the state is now poised to become the first to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors.
The law bans insurance plans from covering or reimbursing the cost of transition-related care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormones. After it takes effect this summer, Hughes’ student won’t be able to use testosterone unless they pay out of pocket, which Hughes said is “not that likely given their situation.”
Heather Hughes.Courtesy Heather Hughes
Hughes, who is also trans, called the Arkansas law “ridiculous” and said it “opens up the door to more restrictions.” She said her doctor informed her that part of the law will also explicitly allow private insurance companies in the state to refuse to cover gender-affirming care for trans people of any age.
“We’re already getting priced out of so many things and already face enough — why make it worse?”
Hughes is one of 17,300 educators in the U.S. and Canada who signed an open letter to President Joe Biden Monday calling on him to do more to directly address the wave of state bills targeting transgender young people. There are currently 20 states that have introduced bills that would prohibit or restrict transition care for trans minors, according to the ACLU, and more than 30 that have introduced measures that would ban trans student athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. According to the Movement Advancement Project, five states — Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Dakota — have passed such legislation, though a federal judge stopped Idaho’s law from taking effect last August.
Harper Keenan, an assistant professor in the department of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, helped organize the letter.
Keenan taught elementary students in New York City public schools for five years, and said the bills create a dangerous power dynamic. Legislation that bans transgender student athletes from competing on the sports teams that align with their gender identity, for example, positions transgender girls “as predators invading girls’ spaces,” he said.
Harper Keenan.Courtesy Bonnie Chan
“This is a violation of some of our most fundamental responsibilities as educators, which is to support and protect the young people that we work with,” Keenan said. “When we position young people as predators, especially a particular group of young people as predators, we really put them in danger.”
The letter from educators calls on the Biden administration to protect transgender young people’s access to health care, school facilities and activities, and school records and identification that reflects their self-identified gender.
“Anti-trans bills are merely the tip of a much larger iceberg of anti-trans sentiment, gender misunderstandings, and the scapegoating of trans youth that serves to mobilize a conservative base,” the letter states.
The Biden administration did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the letter, but an official did confirm that Biden issued an executive order this month stating that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which protects students at schools receiving public funds from sex-based discrimination, also protects them from discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. The Department of Justice supported Biden’s order in a memo released Monday, which said it interprets Title IX to protect LGBTQ students.
The official also said the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced on Tuesday that it will conduct a comprehensive review of Title IX regulations to fulfill Biden’s recent executive order.
Lawmakers who support restrictions on trans student athletes have said these measures are necessary to protect cisgender girls’ opportunities in sports. However, legislators in almost all the states considering bans could not cite any known cases where trans girls’ participation in sports caused a problem in their state or region, according to an Associated Press report published last month.
Still, Hutchinson said the state’s ban on trans athletes in sports, which he signed March 25, “will help promote and maintain fairness in women’s sporting events.”
Supporters of the gender-affirming care restrictions argue that they’re protecting minors who are too young to make medical decisions. The sponsor of Arkansas’ recently passed trans health bill, state Rep. Robin Lundstrum, a Republican, compared it to laws that prevent minors from purchasing alcohol until they’re 21.
“They need to get to be 18 before they make those decisions,” Lundstum said, according to The Associated Press.
Some teachers believe the debate over trans minors’ access to care is really a debate over their existence. Elizabeth-Marie Helms, a trans middle school social studies teacher in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said legislators “don’t really have any interest in science-based medicine.” She noted that lawmakers in Indiana, like those in Arkansas, want to ban trans minors’ access to puberty blockers, even though they have long been used to treat precocious puberty in cisgender youth and wouldn’t be banned for cisgender young people.
“I try to teach my students, ‘Listen to others with empathy. Even if you don’t agree with them, try to understand their points of view,’” Helms said. “In these cases at the state level, it’s just really unclear what a sincere approach to these Republican talking points would even look like, because it just nakedly looks like they’re trying to erase trans people.”
Some cisgender educators like Melissa Tracy, who teaches at a high school in Delaware, said they’re worried about the effects of the bills on trans students at school.
“It’s personal for me, because I think of every trans student who has ever sat in my classroom, and, frankly, they deserve better,” she said. “They are not political pawns.”
Tracy said she participated in a workshop 10 years ago that changed her understanding of the needs of LGBTQ youth. The presenter said that 30 to 40 percent of LGBTQ students will experience suicidal ideation. (That number is higher for trans youth: Fifty-two percent reported that they seriously considered suicide from December 2019 to March 2020, according to the Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.)
“Since then, I’ve tried to really do right by the students that I teach,” Tracy said.
Several states, including Alabama and Iowa, are considering bills that would force state employees, including teachers, to out students to their parents if they believe a student is questioning their gender. Being forced to “out” a student takes away their agency and jeopardizes one of the few places that some trans youth feel safer, according to Tracy.
“Why wouldn’t we want to do whatever we can to create safe spaces for our students, because, frankly, some of the students that I have taught have not been accepted at home, and literally the only place where they might feel accepted is at school,” she said. “And then you remove that space of acceptance, and they can’t be who they want to be, and that’s just not right.”
Some teachers and advocates say they’re already seeing the national conversation affect trans students.
Julia Cuneo, a youth organizer and educator who helps high school students in Detroit with advocacy campaigns, said a few students have reached out to “express fear and concern” after Republican lawmakers in Michigan introduced a trans athlete ban.
“We have some students who are trans and genderqueer and who are really worried about the ways that their school will target them, and the ways that they won’t be able to express themselves in their classes,” Cuneo, who uses gender neutral pronouns, said. Some students fear their identity could be both disrespected and used against them or that they could be outed.
“They don’t know exactly how this will manifest,” Cuneo said. “The legislators write the law but then it’s kind of up to schools how it gets enforced, and so that uncertainty is really really scary.”
Cuneo said the bills put students and teachers against each other. They said they don’t know of any teachers who openly support Michigan’s athlete ban, but “I’ve definitely talked to teachers who feel like, ‘Well, the law is the law, and I have to do it or I’ll get in trouble.’”
Currently, both teachers and students want to create a safe environment for learning, but if the bills become law, their interests would clash, according to Cuneo.
“I think that’s really the end goal of the GOP in this moment, is to try and put that wedge between supporters and allies, people who are in solidarity with queer people, and the young people who are coming out,” they said.
Tracy said she wonders whether the sponsors of the bills know any trans youth or have spoken with any.
“I guarantee you that if they took even just 10 minutes out of their busy schedule to talk to somebody that perhaps their viewpoint might change,” she said. “Ultimately, I think this is just what I want to tell those legislators: It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s about the kids of America. It’s about the kids in your state.”
Lucas Wilson said he received conversion therapy from a student club called Band of Brothers at Liberty University from 2008 to 2012, when he was an undergraduate student.
Wilson, now 30, said when he visited campus prior to enrolling, he saw an ad for “struggling with same-sex attraction.”
“The biggest factor in why I chose Liberty was ultimately the conversion therapy program because I, in fact, believed that one could become straight,” Wilson said.
He is now one of 33 LGBTQ students who are suing the Department of Education in a class-action lawsuit filed Monday. The students allege that they faced discrimination at 25 federally funded Christian colleges and universities in 18 states.
Wilson said Liberty University is a “thoroughly homophobic institution” and that, in addition to offering conversion therapy in the form of a student club, he also had several classes that taught “the evils of the homosexual lifestyle.”
Lucas Wilson, 30, alleged Liberty University is a “thoroughly homophobic institution.” He said he received conversion therapy through a student club now known as Armor Bearers.Cole Burston
He said the conversion therapy group, and the culture at Liberty, “amplified and compounded feelings of self-hatred, feelings of shame and guilt and anxiety that ultimately took years to deconstruct.”
The Religious Exemption Accountability Project, or REAP, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ students at taxpayer-funded religious colleges and universities, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Oregon on behalf of former and current students.
Liberty University has not responded to NBC News’ requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Education said the Biden administration is “fully committed to equal education access for all students.”
The spokesperson added that President Joe Biden stated in an executive order earlier this month, “It is the policy of my Administration that all students should be guaranteed an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence, and including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Many Christian colleges and universities receive federal funding and are still allowed to enforce policies that, for example, prohibit same-sex relationships on campus. That’s because Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, contains an exemption for religious entities.
The students’ lawsuit argues that the religious exemption is unconstitutional and that it allows the Department of Education “to breach its duty” to LGBTQ students at religious colleges and universities “where discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is codified in campus policies and openly practiced.”
The ultimate goal of the lawsuit is to strike down Title IX’s religious exemption.
Paul Southwick, the director of REAP, said the main premise of his argument is that the federal government is “not allowed to pass laws or take actions that target a politically unpopular group.”
“Here, what the religious exemption to Title IX is doing is, it really targets people based on sex, which includes sexual orientation and gender identity, for inferior treatment,” Southwick said.
His argument claims that the religious exemption is unconstitutional because it violates the due process and equal protection rights afforded to LGBTQ people and it violates the establishment clause because it “favors certain fundamentalist religious organizations and gives them preferential treatment above all other educational institutions, including religious educational institutions that have affirming beliefs about LGBTQ people.”
Regarding the religious exemption, the Department of Education spokesperson said the text of Title IX states it does not apply to “an educational institution which is controlled by a religious organization” where its application “would not be consistent with the religious tenets of such organization.”
Southwick’s constitutional argument is based on a number of cases, but he said one of the most important is Bob Jones University v. United States, which found in 1983 that Bob Jones University did not get to maintain its tax-exempt status due to an interracial dating ban — a policy the university claimed was based in its sincerely held religious beliefs.
The Supreme Court held in an 8-1 decision that limitations on religious liberty can be justified by an “overriding governmental interest” such as prohibiting racial discrimination. As a result, it found that “not all burdens on religion are unconstitutional.”
Southwick said mainstream LGBTQ organizations haven’t done enough to fight for LGBTQ students at religious colleges, and that’s because “when you talk about queer kids at Christian colleges, their responses are ‘What the hell are they doing there?’”
LGBTQ students often attend religious colleges for a host of reasons, but mainly because they’re born into fundamentalist Christian families, Southwick said.
“The natural consequence of that is that — gay or straight — a lot of them will end up at Christian colleges, and when they’re there, they’re treated inhumanely and subjected to these dangerous and abusive policies and practices,” he said.
Some of the plaintiffs claim they were denied admission to or expelled from religious colleges due to being LGBTQ. Others say their colleges have strict policies surrounding sexuality and purity.
“The general language that you’ll find in a lot of the policies is as follows: The schools prohibit homosexual conduct, homosexual relationships, transgender conduct, which they struggle with how to describe,” Southwick said. “And they prohibit same-sex marriages. So what that means is kids are getting engaged and hiding it because they’ll be expelled. Kids who are found out are being expelled. What it means is when a nonbinary or a trans student is dressing and grooming and using names and pronouns consistent with their gender identity, they’re punished.”
The student club that offers conversion therapy at Liberty University still exists, though now it’s called Armor Bearers, according to the school’s 2020 “Pathways Handbook,” which provides students with a “menu” of “educational opportunities” to choose from if they violate school policy.
Wilson said the lawsuit will help shed light on the policies at Liberty and other religious schools.
“We’re putting pressure on these schools to change how they treat their LGBTQ students, so for me, this is very important work,” he said. “It’s work that is long overdue.”
Tatiana Williams said she “adopted” her daughter Alexus Braxton about 25 years ago in Miami after the two met while doing sex work to survive.
“It was her and a group of friends, they would come hang out,” she said. “And I think they were looking for a sense of family.”
The two became each other’s chosen family, and Williams said “Lexus” — as she calls her — “would be my ear to the streets” and her source for gossip.
“She has a lot of people that feed her information, you know, and she was a good source when it came to information,” she said.
On Feb. 4, Braxton was found dead in her apartment. Miami-Dade Police are investigating her death as a homicide, and Detective Juan Segovia said in a Feb. 15 statement that she was killed in a “violent and vicious attack.”
Williams said she’s devastated. She’s familiar with cases like Braxton’s, both personally and as an advocate — she’s also the executive director of Transinclusive Group, a nonprofit in South Florida. In 1999, her friend Pilar was murdered in front of her. Now, more than 20 years later, she’s lost her adopted daughter.
“For once in my lifetime, all of the advocacy work that I do, in this case, I find myself being involved,” she said. “I’m more emotional, as opposed to my advocacy hat where I get to move to the other side.”
Braxton is one of at least 10 transgender people murdered so far in 2021 — a 233 percent increase from this point last year, when three trans people had been murdered. Half of the victims so far in 2021, including Braxton, are Black trans women.
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, has called violence against transgender people “a national epidemic” and requested in a list of policy recommendations released in November that the Biden administration form an interagency working group to address anti-transgender violence.
Advocates say preventing anti-trans violence requires a comprehensive approach that spans many sectors, but it also requires governments and law enforcement to better understand the trans community.
‘The full scope of the problem’
It’s difficult to know with certainty how widespread violence against trans people is in part because the government doesn’t track it. That’s why the National Center for Transgender Equality would like the Department of Justice to do a comprehensive study of the violence, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the organization’s deputy executive director, said.
“We are left with a patchwork of state and local information that doesn’t really add up to giving us the complete picture,” he said. The center tracks the murders of transgender people largely through social media, local reporting, and by confirming information with other LGBTQ organizations.
But that method likely leaves people out. For example, advocates say that “at least” 10 trans people have been murdered in 2021 because police departments and local media often deadname and misgender trans people when reporting on their deaths.
“We are having to piece things together as best we can, but we don’t have the resources or the ability to cross-reference everything nationally that the federal government has,” Heng-Lehtinen said.
Another piece of the puzzle is sexual orientation and gender identity mortality data, said Sam Brinton, vice president of advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization. Brinton said law enforcement should be taught how to ask friends and family members about the deceased’s identity during death investigations.
For example, in 2019, Los Angeles County became the first jurisdiction in the nation to pass a motion to train medical examiners and coroners to investigate the violent deaths of LGBTQ people and to collect mortality data on sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Asking affirming questions to family and friends and community members when you are doing a death investigation will give us actual whole and complete data,” Brinton said.
Knowing the extent of the problem would allow advocates and lawmakers to come up with better prevention efforts, Brinton said, comparing the lack of mortality data in violent crimes to Covid-19 data. “We do not know how many trans people have died from Covid because we do not ask the questions,” Brinton said. “When you don’t ask the death questions, the life of the person and the life of the next generation is really at risk.”
Stigma leading to violence
Though a number of factors influence violence against transgender people, one of the most significant is stigma, according to Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
David said a number of Trump administration proposals contributed to stigma, such as proposals to allow homeless shelters to reject transgender people and allow health care providers to refuse to serve trans people. Those measures, as well as then-President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, “trickle down to ordinary citizens who think that transgender people are not human,” he said.
Directors of TKO with Alabama state Rep. Laura Hall.TC Caldwell / Knights and Orchids Society
In addition, the more than 70 bills targeting transgender people being heard in state legislatures across the country “undermine trans identities,” he said.
Anti-trans stigma affects trans people from a young age. Quentin Bell, executive director of the Knights and Orchids Society, an Alabama-based trans-led nonprofit, said many of the organization’s clients don’t have a high school diploma because they dropped out of school due to stigma and violence.
“I literally have a 17-year-old who’s currently in our program, and she could not be happier when school ends in May,” Bell said. “She feels like her life can start when school finally ends, and that the pandemic has been a good thing because she hasn’t had to face the violence and the ridicule every day.”
On Feb. 24, a city work crew found the body of Jenna Franks, who friends and family have described as a transgender woman and genderfluid, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, according to WITN. On March 3, police said they were investigating her death as a homicide, making her the 10th known transgender person slain in 2021.
Dennis Biancuzzo, executive director for the Onslow County LGBTQ Center, said the center had helped Franks find housing after she completed treatment for substance misuse. But in January, she relapsed and became homeless again. Biancuzzo said he tried to contact her about 10 times since then, but he never heard from her.
Jenna Franks.Courtesy Jenna Franks
“She was a loving person,” he said. “She wanted to be able to do peer counseling and help people that have been through the situation she had been through.”
Biancuzzo said the community center started a program to support people experiencing homelessness, and through that program he helped Franks and others apply for health care. But, he said, someone at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services customer service center told him they would only be eligible for limited services.
“What each one of them was told, as an individual, they could receive North Carolina family planning health assistance, which consists of one physical a year, treatment for any sexually transmitted diseases and sterilization,” he said. “I blew a gasket with the woman I was speaking to from the state. When she said the word sterilization, my head exploded.”
When Franks completed her drug treatment program, Biancuzzo said she was put on the street. He said there’s no continuum of care, which would coordinate various services for people experiencing homelessness. “There’s no health care, there’s no food equity, there’s no housing, and those are things that have to be done if you take a person and put them in a treatment facility for 28 days. You cannot just put them out on the street when you’re done with them,” he said.
Bell said that many trans people who experience homelessness can’t go to shelters. He said he’s called every shelter in the Selma area, and even some in Montgomery, Alabama, to ask them if they provide services to trans people.
“They will tell you blatantly on the phone — they don’t care how discriminatory it is — they don’t house transgender people, or even worse, ‘We don’t have them, we don’t house those people,’” he said.
When trans people face job and housing discrimination, and then can’t even turn to shelters, they often engage in sex work to survive, Heng-Lehtinen said, which can put them in dangerous situations and lead to a criminal record.
The stigmitization surrounding sex work can also affect how the deaths of trans women — particularly Black trans women, who are more likely to engage in sex work — are investigated. For example, Williams said she was hesitant to share with Miami-Dade Police that Braxton was going to start an account on OnlyFans, a subscription platform that allows people to share adult content. “I was afraid if I gave too much information that he would get turned off from the case,” she said.
She said police departments need to have a better understanding of the trans community in order to adequately investigate murders of trans people. “I think that law enforcement doesn’t understand how often this is happening within the community, because they’re thinking like, ‘Oh, this is just a one-off,’” Williams said. “But if they were to do a little deeper research, they would see it’s not just a one-off, and what does that look like when you are working in regards to that community and solving these cases.”
She said she’d like to see policy reform at all levels of government that instills a “sense of urgency” in law enforcement when it comes to investigating and solving the murders of trans people.
In the meantime, though, she is trying to cope with Braxton’s death. She said she also jokes with people, saying “So where am I going to get all my gossip from?”
“She would call you 2 o’clock in the morning and have me laughing, and so she brought a lot of joy and laughter to people, just because of her being wise, you know, her knowing a lot of people,” Williams said. “She would bring me joy and laughter in the process.”
